"Human sacrifice, personal iPads & production PCs living together...mass hysteria!"
Our network has a mix of various devices that should not coexist. Problems and more problems have resulted! Need to lock things down.

I'm an IT manager of 3 (and some change) years by way of the bad economy and my mouth saying I liked tinkering with computers when I first interviewed at my company. I know users are streaming internet radio and maybe even watching streaming video, is there a way to run a report in spiceworks or another program and see the computers doing that?

Forgive me if it's a silly question, I've looked around and can't find anything. It's against our corporate policy and my boss is asking for specific users that are violating.

Hi Steve! As far as I know, the best you can do with Spiceworks is to produce a report of bandwidth usage. Go to Inventory > Reports and run the "Network Bandwidth Usage" report, then click on the "Avg Net Bandwidth Last Day" header a couple times to sort the report by bandwidth in descending order. Just because a computer is using a lot of bandwidth doesn't mean the user is watching streaming video, of course, but that might provide a starting point for further investigation.

Depending on what you're using for a firewall, it may provide some reporting functionality which would let you narrow down which sites the traffic is going to, which will be a lot more useful for your purposes.

4 Replies

Hi Steve! As far as I know, the best you can do with Spiceworks is to produce a report of bandwidth usage. Go to Inventory > Reports and run the "Network Bandwidth Usage" report, then click on the "Avg Net Bandwidth Last Day" header a couple times to sort the report by bandwidth in descending order. Just because a computer is using a lot of bandwidth doesn't mean the user is watching streaming video, of course, but that might provide a starting point for further investigation.

Depending on what you're using for a firewall, it may provide some reporting functionality which would let you narrow down which sites the traffic is going to, which will be a lot more useful for your purposes.

I know users are doing it because I have been in there offices fixing stuff and seen it, but unfortunately in my office I can't just go in and tell my boss, and I don't have the authority to tell them to stop.

1st Post

You may want to look at a filtering software in order to stop them from accessing things on the internet that they are not supposed to. I use untangle where I work and it has a decent gui. Along with a pretty granular breakdown of who is doing what when over the internet. Even has automated reports that it can email about violations, and usage among other things.